Yosimar Reyes
Rhetorical Analysis Illegal immigrant, Illegal Aliens, and Undocumented are just some of the terms used as labels of those who travel across the US/Mexico border seeking a life that is bountiful and where social mobility is possible. For an estimated 12.5 million undocumented citizens (Raley 1) living in the United States today, these words are simply the labels that are attached to them— as their names and their stories are forgotten and overlooked. The struggle for an identity is clearly experienced in Yosimar Reyes’s narrative, We Have Never Needed Documents to Thrive, In this short narrative the reader receives first hand insight into the mind of an undocumented citizen living in the United States today. With Reyes’s moving story, he
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In this power passage Reyes employs the genre of a first-person narrative, which proves to powerful in both getting his message from the undocumented community across, as well as forming a bond with his audience. By telling his experience of exclusion and pain, a storyline is formed which gives the reader an experience that is far more personal compared to Mendelson’s review. Filled with powerful diction about his struggles, Reyes immediately grabs the readers attention with a deep rooted emotional connection. This is easily seen in his first remark “I was forced to make peace with the fact that my life as an undocumented queer was going to be one filled with challenged” (Reyes 2). In this excerpt, it is obvious that Reyes’s first-person narrative gives the reader a deep look into the being of undocumented and that the ideal mold of a heterosexual, employed person that Mendelson using as her foundational argument is not true— and in fact is oversimplified. Reyes understands the reader who very well could be a U.S. natural born citizen, and he succeeds at starting a moral and emotionally driven conversation about being undocumented in the US. He pushes the reader to think further and broader their mind to the realities that undocumented immigrants are human too. In that place, the reader can see undocumented citizens the same American as all citizens “with papers” today: gay, straight, white, black and everything in-between. And in that conglomerate of people: They all experience the freedoms of America. His narrative succeeds in pushing this idea to the reader that the often social media, “cookie-cutter” undocumented citizen that Mendelson refers to repeatedly such as “…Mr. Rodriguez, ‘a hardworking father,’ juggles two jobs, which ‘bring him happiness’ because they provide for his family’s ‘health and well being’” (Mendelson 1043). It is obvious that he doesn’t even fit
In this power passage Reyes employs the genre of a first-person narrative, which proves to powerful in both getting his message from the undocumented community across, as well as forming a bond with his audience. By telling his experience of exclusion and pain, a storyline is formed which gives the reader an experience that is far more personal compared to Mendelson’s review. Filled with powerful diction about his struggles, Reyes immediately grabs the readers attention with a deep rooted emotional connection. This is easily seen in his first remark “I was forced to make peace with the fact that my life as an undocumented queer was going to be one filled with challenged” (Reyes 2). In this excerpt, it is obvious that Reyes’s first-person narrative gives the reader a deep look into the being of undocumented and that the ideal mold of a heterosexual, employed person that Mendelson using as her foundational argument is not true— and in fact is oversimplified. Reyes understands the reader who very well could be a U.S. natural born citizen, and he succeeds at starting a moral and emotionally driven conversation about being undocumented in the US. He pushes the reader to think further and broader their mind to the realities that undocumented immigrants are human too. In that place, the reader can see undocumented citizens the same American as all citizens “with papers” today: gay, straight, white, black and everything in-between. And in that conglomerate of people: They all experience the freedoms of America. His narrative succeeds in pushing this idea to the reader that the often social media, “cookie-cutter” undocumented citizen that Mendelson refers to repeatedly such as “…Mr. Rodriguez, ‘a hardworking father,’ juggles two jobs, which ‘bring him happiness’ because they provide for his family’s ‘health and well being’” (Mendelson 1043). It is obvious that he doesn’t even fit